Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

7. THE RESOLUTION OF THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS, 1896

This resolution reads:

“This Congress declares that it stands for the full
right of all nations to self-determination
[Selbstbestimmungsrecht] and expresses its sympathy for the
workers of ever country now suffering under the yoke of military, national
or other absolutism. This Congress calls upon the workers of all these
countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious
[Klassenbewusste—those who understand their
class interests] workers of the whole world in order jointly to fight for
the defeat of international capitalism and for the achievement of the aims
of international
Social-Democracy.”[1]

As we have already pointed out, our opportunists—Semkovsky, Liebman
and Yurkevich—are simply unaware of this resolution. But Rosa Luxemburg
knows it and quotes the full text, which contains the same expression as
that contained in our programme, viz., “self-determination”.

How does Rosa Luxemburg remove this obstacle from the path of her
“original” theory?

Oh, quite simply ... the whole emphasis lies in the second part of the
resolution ... its declarative character ... one can refer to it only by
mistake!

The feebleness and utter confusion of our author are simply
amazing. Usually it is only the opportunists who talk about the consistent
democratic and socialist points in the programme being mere declarations,
and cravenly avoid an open debate on them. It is apparently not without
reason that Rosa Luxemburg has this time found herself in the deplorable
company of the Semkovskys, Liebmans and Yurkeviches. Rosa Luxemburg does
not venture to state openly whether she regards the above resolution as
correct or erroneous. She shifts and shuffles as if counting on the
inattentive or ill-informed reader, who forgets the first part of the
resolution by the time he has started reading the second, or who has never
heard of the discussion that took place in the socialist press
prior to the London Congress.

Rosa Luxemburg is greatly mistaken, however, if she imagines that, in
the sight of the class-conscious workers of Russia, she can get away with
trampling upon the resolution of the International on such an important
fundamental issue, without even deigning to analyse it critically.

Rosa Luxemburg’s point of view was voiced during the discussions which
took place prior to the London Congress, mainly in the columns of Die
Neue Zeit, organ of the German
Marxists; in essence this point of view was defeated in the
International! That is the crux of the matter, which the Russian
reader must particularly bear in mind.

The debate turned on the question of Poland’s independence. Three
points of view were put forward:

1.
That of the “Fracy”, in whose name Haecker spoke. They wanted the
International to include in its own programme a demand for the
independence of Poland. The motion was not carried and this point of view
was defeated in the International.

2.
Rosa Luxemburg’s point of view, viz., the Polish socialists should not
demand independence for Poland. This point of view entirely precluded the
proclamation of the right of nations to self-determination. It was likewise
defeated in the International.

3.
The point of view which was elaborated at the time by K. Kautsky, who
opposed Rosa Luxemburg and proved that her materialism was extremely
“one-sided”; according to Kautsky, the International could not at the
time make the independence of Poland a point in its programme; but the
Polish socialists were fully entitled to put forward such a demand. From
the socialists’ point of view it was undoubtedly a mistake to ignore the
tasks of national liberation in a situation where national oppression
existed.

The International’s resolution reproduces the most essential and
fundamental propositions in this point of view:
on the one hand, the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full
right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally
unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their
class struggle.

We think that this resolution is absolutely correct, and that, to the
countries of Eastern Europe and Asia at the beginning of the twentieth
century, it is this resolution, with both its parts being taken as an
integral whole, that gives the only correct lead to the proletarian class
policy in the national question.

Let us deal with the three above-mentioned viewpoints in somewhat
greater detail.

As is known, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels considered it the bounden
duty of the whole of West-European democracy, and still more of
Social-Democracy, to give active support to
the demand for Polish independence. For the period of the 1840s and 1860s,
the period of the bourgeois revolutions in Austria and Germany, and the
period of the “Peasant Reform” in
Russia,[3] this point of view was quite correct and the only one that
was consistently democratic and proletarian. So long as the masses of the
people in Russia and in most of the Slav countries were still sunk in
torpor, so long as there were no independent, mass, democratic
movements in those countries, the liberation movement of the
gentry in Poland assumed an immense and paramount importance from
the point of view, not only of Russian, not only of Slav, but of European
democracy as a
whole.[2][4]

But while Marx’s standpoint was quite correct for the forties, fifties
and sixties or for the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it has
ceased to be correct by the twentieth century. Independent democratic
movements, and even an independent proletarian movement, have arisen in
most Slav countries, even in Russia, one of the most backward Slav
countries. Aristocratic Poland has disappeared, yielding place to
capitalist Poland. Under such circumstances Poland could not but lose her
exceptional revolutionary importance.

The attempt of the P.S.P. (the Polish Socialist Party, the present-day
“Fracy”) in 1896 to “establish” for all time the point of view Marx had
held in a different epoch was an attempt to use the
letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism. The
Polish Social-Democrats were therefore quite right in attacking the extreme
nationalism of the Polish petty bourgeoisie and pointing out that the
national question was of secondary importance to Polish workers, in
creating for the first time a purely proletarian party in Poland and
proclaiming the extremely important principle that the Polish and the
Russian workers must maintain the closest alliance in their class struggle.

But did this mean that at the beginning of the twentieth century the
International could regard the principle of political self-determination of
nations, or the right to secede, as unnecessary to Eastern Europe and Asia?
This would have been the height of absurdity, and (theoretically)
tantamount to admitting that the bourgeois-democratic reform of the
Turkish, Russian and Chinese states had been consummated; indeed it would
have been tantamount (in practice) to opportunism, towards absolutism.

No. At a time when bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe
and Asia have begun, in this period of the awakening and intensification of
national movements and of the formation of independent proletarian parties,
the task of these parties with regard to national policy must be twofold:
recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination, since
bourgeois-democratic reform is-not yet completed and since working-class
democracy consistently, seriously and sincerely (and not in a liberal,
Kokoshkin fashion) fights for equal rights for nations; then, a close,
unbreakable alliance in the class struggle of the proletarians of all
nations in a given state, throughout all the changes in its history,
irrespective of any reshaping of the frontiers of the individual states by
the bourgeoisie.

It is this twofold task of the proletariat that the 1896 resolution of
the International formulates. That is the substance, the underlying
principle, of the resolution adopted by the Conference of Russian Marxists
held in the summer of 1913. Some people profess to see a “contradiction”
in the fact that while point 4 of this resolution, which recognises the
right to self-determination and secession, seems to “concede” the maximum
to nationalism (in reality, the recognition of the right of all
nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and
the minimum of nationalism), point 5 warns the workers against the
nationalist slogans of the bourgeoisie of any nation and demands the unity
and amalgamation of the workers of all nations in internationally united
proletarian organisations. But this is a “contradiction”
only for extremely shallow minds, which, for instance, cannot grasp why the
unity and class solidarity of the Swedish and the Norwegian proletariat
gained when the Swedish workers upheld Norway’s freedom to secede
and form an independent state.

Notes

[1]
See the official German report of the London Congress:
Verhandlungen und Beschlüsse des internationalen sozialistischen
Arbeiterund Gewerkschafts-Kongresses zu London, vom 27. Juli bis
1. August 1896, Berlin, 1896, S. 18. A Russian pamphlet has been
published containing the decisions of international congresses in which
the word “self determination” is wrongly translated as “autonomy”.
—Lenin

[2]
It would be a very interesting piece of historical research to compare
the position of a noble Polish rebel in 1863 with that of the all-Russia
revolutionary democrat, Chernyshevsky, who (like Marx), was able to
appreciate the importance of the Polish movement, and with that of the
Ukrainian petty bourgeois Dragomanov, who appeared much later and expressed
the views of a peasant, so ignorant and sluggish, and so attached to his
dung heap, that his legitimate hatred of the Polish gentry blinded him to
the significance which their struggle had for all-Russia
democracy. (Cf. Dragomanov, Historical Poland and Great-Russian
Democracy.) Dragomanov richly deserved the fervent kisses which were
subsequently bestowed on him by Mr. P. B. Struve, who by that time had
become a national-liberal. —Lenin

[4]
Lenin is referring to the Polish national liberation insurrection of
1863–64 against the yoke of the tsarist autocracy. The original cause of
the rising was the tsarist government’s decision to carry out a special
recruitment aimed at removing the revolutionary-minded youth
en masse from the cities. At first the rising was led by a Central
National Committee formed by the petty-nobles’ party of the “Reds” in
1862. Its programme demanding national independence for Poland, equal
rights for all men in the land, irrespective of religion or birth, transfer
to the peasants of the land tilled by them with full right of ownership and
without redemption payments, abolition of the corvée, compensation
for the landlords for the alienated lands out of the state funds, etc.,
attracted to the uprising diverse sections of the Polish
population—artisans, workers, students, intellectuals from among the
gentry, part of the peasantry and the clergy.

In the course of the insurrection, elements united around the party of
the “Whites” (the party of the big landed aristocracy and the big
bourgeoisie) joined it with the intention of using it in their own
interests and, with the help of Britain and France, securing a profitable
deal with the tsarist government.

The attitude of the revolutionary democrats of Russia towards the
rebels was one of deep sympathy, the members of Zemlya i Volya
secret society associated with N. G. Chernyshevsky trying to give them
every possible assistance. The Central Committee of Zemlya i Volya
issued an appeal “To the Russian Officers and Soldiers”, which was
distributed among the troops sent to suppress the
insurrection. A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogaryov published a
number of articles in Kolokol devoted to the struggle of the
Polish people, and rendered material aid to the rebels.

Owing to the inconsistency of the party of the “Reds”, which failed
to hold the revolutionary initiative, the leadership of the uprising passed
into the hands of the “Whites”, who betrayed it. By the summer of 1864,
the insurrection was brutally crushed by the tsarist troops.

Marx and Engels, who regarded the Polish insurrection of 1863–64 as a
progressive movement, were fully in sympathy with it and wished the Polish
people victory in its struggle for national liberation. On behalf of the
German emigrant colony in London, Marx wrote an appeal for aid to the
Poles.